After You Read

You have just read Grief Becomes My Friend.

I had said yes. Yes to Darrell. Yes to marriage. Yes, in some strange and still-frightening way, to life.

It would be tempting to tell the story as though one thing naturally followed the other. I had grieved. Life reached toward me. I chose to live again. But grief did not arrange itself that neatly.

My wedding day should have been evidence that I had moved forward. Instead, the sight of Jeff's mother and sisters-in-law sitting in the second row nearly undid me. Therese had become like a mother to me. She had made the dress I wore when I married Jeff. Now she was watching me marry someone else. I felt as though I were betraying him.

Later that night, while my new husband waited for me, I sat sobbing in a bathtub. That was also part of saying yes to life.

As you think back over the chapter, you may notice how often grief returned just when it seemed I should have been somewhere else by then. I thought so too.

When Grief Comes Back

There were good reasons to be happy. I loved Darrell. He loved me. He loved Jeffrey. He did something especially important for our family: he welcomed the Wades into our new life. He encouraged them to visit and wanted us to talk about Jeff. He understood that Jeffrey needed to know his father and the family he came from.

None of that stopped the guilt. On my wedding night, the question was not whether I loved Darrell. I did. The question was how I could love him while I was still in love with Jeff. I felt like an imposter.

Then we returned to Arizona and to the house where Jeff and I had lived. When Darrell climbed into the bed that had been mine and Jeff's, I could see Jeff fading in and out of the space Darrell occupied. Darrell understood enough to leave. I tore the linens from the bed and eventually crawled into the guest bed beside him. We held hands without speaking.

There are moments in grief when language is too small. There are also moments when something we thought we had already lived through comes back with astonishing force. That does not make what happened before unreal. My happiness with Darrell was real. My grief for Jeff was real. Neither one canceled the other.

Has grief ever returned at a time when you thought you should have been doing better?

You might notice the word should before you try to answer anything else.

A Life Can Be New and Still Carry What Came Before

We moved to Hawaii. There was a new home, a new mattress free of my haunts, beaches and the zoo and swim lessons. I watched Darrell and Jeffrey together. We had another son, Brian. Life was happening, and I was out of sorts in my own skin.

When the container carrying our belongings arrived, we discovered that things had been stolen. Among them were our family videos—Jeffrey as a baby, our weddings, pieces of lives that could not be recreated.

I fell apart.

A videotape can look like an object until it is the only place a moment still exists. A bed can look like furniture until someone else lies in it. A house can be a house until you walk through the door and encounter the life you once lived there.

Grief kept showing me that what had been lost was larger than a single fact. Jeff was dead, but there was also the life in which he had been alive: places, objects, habits, memories, dreams, versions of myself, and a future that once seemed ordinary because I had no reason to imagine it disappearing. Some of those things could coexist with my new life easily. Some could not.

Has something ordinary ever carried more of your grief than you expected it to?

You don't have to decide what that means. Just notice what it carried.

The Things I Could Not Make Fit

Then came the nightmares. In one, Jeff and I were rushing toward each other and I had to catch him. I almost did. Then he was swept away from me, and somehow losing him was my fault.

In another, he returned alive. He had been hidden from me. He was hurt that I had not waited. Darrell and Jeff became friends, and together they would raise our boys. But I had to leave them all.

There was no arrangement my dreaming mind could create in which everyone remained and I did too. That may be one of the cruelest things about some losses: reality will not give us an ending in which everything we love can be kept.

I could not make Jeff alive and still have the life that had come after his death. I could not undo what happened. I could not make every part of my life fit together without contradiction. For a long time, I kept trying to understand something that may not have been understandable in the way I wanted it to be. My life did not become coherent because I demanded coherence from it. It remained mysterious.

The Journals

Then Darrell found the journals. I had written them during my first widowhood. They held things I had barely spoken aloud—the suffering, the prayers, the questions, the parts of grief that had been crowded out while I cared for Jeffrey and tried to keep going.

I wanted the journals taped back inside the box. Darrell wanted to read them. Eventually, I let him. He read the words of the woman I had been before he knew me. He cried for her. He cried for Jeff. He did not compete with a dead man or try to make my first marriage smaller so that our marriage could become larger. He simply grieved what had happened. He was sorry Jeff died. He wished he hadn't.

That stopped me. How could Darrell wish Jeff had lived? If Jeff had lived, Darrell and I would never have met.

But Darrell understood something I had not expected him to say. If Jeff had lived, I would never have known that I was missing Darrell. Jeffrey and I would never have suffered what we had suffered.

Darrell did not need tragedy to become good simply because something beautiful had eventually grown after it. He let the terrible thing remain terrible. And somehow, that mattered.

I did not yet know how to do what Darrell was doing. I was still experiencing these truths as contradictions that demanded an answer from me. If I loved Darrell fully, what did that say about Jeff? If I wished Jeff had lived, what did that say about the life I now loved? Darrell did not solve those questions. He simply made room around them before I knew how to make that room for myself.

When Grief Tells the Truth

I wrote that the moment was inexplicably liberating. I still think inexplicably matters.

I could try to turn what happened into a formula. I could tell you that I finally faced my grief, or accepted my past, or reconciled two lives, and therefore something changed. But a life is not that tidy. What I know is what happened to me.

Darrell read the truth I had written when my grief was raw. He did not correct it. He did not explain why Jeff had died. He did not tell me what good had come from it. He did not need Jeff's death to justify his own place in my life. He grieved with me.

Something changed. The nightmares stopped. I wrote that I finally said goodbye to Jeff. And I wrote something even stranger: Grief had become my friend.

I don't think I meant that grief had become pleasant, or that it was finished. Perhaps grief had stopped being something I needed to defeat in order to prove that I was living. It had interrupted my wedding, followed me into an old bedroom, hidden inside stolen videotapes, appeared in my dreams, and waited inside a box of journals. Again and again, it returned me to something that remained true.

I had loved Jeff. He had died. I wished he hadn't. I loved Darrell. I loved the life that was growing around us. I was only beginning to discover that living did not have to require me to leave one of those truths—or one part of myself—behind.

What Returns?

There may be things in your grief that return: a feeling, a memory, anger you thought had passed, fear you thought you understood, a place you believed you could handle, a song, an object, a dream, or a day when you suddenly feel as though you are standing somewhere you have already been.

I know how easily that can feel like evidence: I thought I was doing better. Why am I back here?

But perhaps back is not always the right word. Your life has continued since the last time you stood there. You have changed. The circumstances around you may have changed. What the grief carries this time may not be exactly what it carried before.

You do not have to make it mean anything yet. You might simply ask: What is still true here? And listen.

Another question may be waiting underneath it: Is there any part of yourself you have felt you needed to leave behind in order to keep living?

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

What did my story help you notice?